


A Paranormal Awakening

by LadyEmrys



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, I watch far too many paranormal shows for my own good, M/M, Mentions of Death, Mentions of Slavery, Rape/Non-con Elements, Slow Burn, The ghost hunting au no one asked for, WARNING: now contains brief and non graphic allusions to rape/non-con, brief mentions of typical early 20th century plantation era violence, but be warned that these white people are awful, contextual backstory is entirely fictitious and not intended to cause offense or upset, especially this one asshole, is now going to be about 16k long, sort of, they're on a cotton plantation but most of the dialogue is centered around present tense, updated tags include the following, was supposed to be a oneshot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-02
Updated: 2017-10-10
Packaged: 2018-07-19 16:49:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7369915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyEmrys/pseuds/LadyEmrys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry Hart - renowned skeptic and freelance paranormal hoax investigator - makes his living disproving the false premonitions of psychics that manipulate grieving families, while secretly hoping to find his own beliefs challenged by something he can't explain. He agrees to guest star on his friend's ghost hunting show, in order to assess the legitimacy of Merlin's new psychic - a street-hardened blonde that possesses a level of extrasensory perception and accuracy that frightens Harry - and the skeptic may have finally found his something more.</p><p>This is most definitely not a magic in the moonlight au, this is straight (lol) spooky ghost hunting (that was originally a 5k oneshot, and is now a 50k+ wip)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Offer

**Author's Note:**

> This is exactly what it sounds like and i will not apologise, I love me some spook and I got this idea after watching The Conjuring 2 (which is fab by the way if you like horror, just as good as the first one).

Dawn found Harry Hart – freelance ‘Paranormal Watchdog’ investigator and renowned sceptic – scratching the day old stubble dusting his jawline as he stretched with a groan to fumble for his phone when the vibrations clattered it closer and closer to the edge of the bedside table.

_He swore the bloody thing was broken, but Merlin insisted there was nothing wrong with it._

The first rays of sunlight in the East that spilled through the cracks in his office blinds found him pouring over another barrage of letters sent from desperate families conned out of time and money by phony psychics and their false promises.

_They took £100 deposit for the reading and never came back and-_

_-they stayed the night and insisted I needed to pay for the next day, but-_

_-their team distracted me and my husband’s laptop was stolen-_

_-the contact details were fake and the police said they’d put out a warning but what about-_

_-the emotional damage my mother has suffered because of this-_

_-fake psychic and their-_

_-phony ghost. It’s obviously a-_

_-hoax-_

One by one the letters began to blur before Harry’s eyes, blue and black ink merging into one underlying problem, the same he had yesterday, and the same the day before. The simple fact of the matter was that there were too many con artists making a mint from duping recently widowed pensioners and vulnerable families, or business owners inventing intricate paranormal hoaxes to attract attention to their hotels and pubs and restaurants and, on one occasion, a bookshop.

Harry would never admit it, but he was beginning to tire of proving each and every case a hoax. In his own space, as he lounged on his sofa drifting off to the sound of the News at Ten, or lay in his bed at night, dreading a return to his desk and his letters, Harry began to wish that once, _just once,_ he could find something _more._

Something more than misdirected cameras and hidden persons knocking on walls and tables. Instead of cleverly researched clients and guesswork, Harry wondered what it would be like to find a psychic who just _knew._

_“I’m not saying I’m ready to abandon everything I’ve ever believed to be true,”_ Harry confessed one night, as he swirled the amber liquid over the ice in his glass. He’d turned to offer another the man reclining in the armchair behind him, rolling his eyes to the ceiling as his friend levelled him with a knowing look, and clutched the offered glass to his cable knit cardigan.

The drops of cooling water coating the glass clung to the soft wool as Merlin lifted it to his lips, and for a long moment the ice clinking in their glasses was the only sound that interrupted the thoughtful silence.

_“So what are you saying?”_

_“I don’t know_ ,” Harry admitted, as he dropped into the chair opposite his friend. He studied the concaving cubes of ice as they melted in on themselves, tracking the flow of brandy as one collapsed entirely and upset the cluster. _“I’d just- for once, Merlin, I’d like to find something inexplicable.”_

_“I thought you liked finding explanations for the obscure?”_

_“I do, but I think its human nature to want to be questioned. It’s not enough to believe in something, Merlin, we need to be given a chance to test the strength of that belief.”_

His mind drifted back from that far away conversation, and Harry grit his teeth against his frustration. Sweeping a pile of letters at random into his briefcase – his Tried And True method for selecting case files – Harry Hart began his day as he began every other day before it – skin prickling and nerves on edge at the thought of finally finding his something _more_.

By noon Harry was slouched in his Greater London office chair turning over a letter in his hand. His assistant had passed it to him as he unlocked his door that morning, and – thanking her gruffly with a dismissing wave as she tried to tell him about a client on hold – he tossed it onto the chair in the corner of his office without much thought until he tore himself from his laptop at lunch.  

His fingers hovered over his trackpad as he glanced between the clock – _12.20_ – and his screen, the greyscale image of a hallway interrupted by static. He’d strained to see the supposed figure moving from one door into another, and after ten minutes of going through the footage frame by frame, Harry still couldn’t see it.

_He’d pass it on to one of the interns to keep them out of his hair for the afternoon._

His attention turned to the letter in the corner, and with a heavy sigh he heaved himself from his chair to pluck it between his fingers and drop it onto his desk. For twenty minutes he sat, staring at the crisp white envelope. It taunted him, plainly marked with a handwritten address, the hallmark of one Chester King – relentlessly persistent producer of BBC Breakfast’s entertainment segment.

King had been pestering him to appear on the programme for years, and had so far been pacified with handwritten reports of Harry’s more famous cases. Harry often found himself nursing a cup of coffee early in the morning, grinning into three slices of thick, buttered toast as he watched Naga Munchetty regale the sleepy public with a far more dramatic tale of his most recent case than he’d haphazardly penned the night before.

There was never a doubt in his mind that King had revised Harry’s words himself, and the younger man relished in making the elder’s work harder by providing as little detail in his reports as possible, picturing King’s tightly pursed lips and white-knuckled grip as he tried to decipher Harry’s drunken chicken scratch and turn it into something that would draw the public imagination in – hook, line, and sinker.

He returned King’s invitation with a promise to consider the offer, hopeful that it would be enough to distract the man for a couple of days.

Dusk found him humming cheerfully into the folds of his coat as he searched for his keys. He’d rushed from the house in such a hurry that morning that he’d left the porch light on, and as he stood in the flickering yellow light his addled tune trailed into nothing as Harry allowed himself a deep breath before turning the key in the lock and swinging the door open into his dimly lit hall – the glow of another lamp he’d forgotten to turn off struggling to fill the vaulted space.

He toed his shoes off and kicked them under the bottom section of his staircase, reaching to turn the matching lamp on where it sat on his sideboard, and thumbing it back into place after noticing the base jutted out from the lip of the table.

He fished the take-out menus from the drawer, sighing as it stuck again and wondering if he shouldn’t have bothered to repaint it in the first place, the varnish only seemed to make the problem worse.

Harry was wrestling with the sideboard when he felt his phone vibrate.

Merlin 20.31: _On my way._

Harry grinned victoriously as the wood gave and he elbowed the drawer into place, making his way through the dark house, flicking lamps on in every room and pausing to bask in the warmth of the living room radiator as the heating gurgled to life.  

When Harry reached his top landing he pulled his office door shut – a physical barrier between himself and the desk that strained under the weight of the paper pleas – and snorted at a second message winking at him from his phone screen.

Merlin 20.45: _Got a surprise for you_  ;)

Tradition dictated that it was time for his comfy take out cardigan – an old present from a long dead, obscure relation – that he didn’t mind getting sticky. It had proven to wash faithfully even after the most explosive masala incidents.

He’d just uncorked the first bottle of wine when he heard the door creaking open, and as he dropped into the supple leather of his sofa, Harry craned his head across the back to find the figure draping his coat over the bannister. Merlin plodded into view with a wave, and pocketed his phone.

“Shoes,” Harry reminded him – out of habit more than any real belief that the other man would ever listen to him. Sure enough, as soon as Merlin kicked them off, he pointedly left them on the floor by his preferred chair, gratefully accepting an empty glass and the bottle of wine from the older man.

Harry began leafing through the menus as Merlin poured their drinks, snorting at his friend’s affronted accusation.

“Terrible host, Harry, making a guest pour their own wine.”

“I thought you had a surprise for me?” murmured Harry over the rim of a menu, peering at the younger man over the tortoiseshell rim that framed his world.

“After dinner,” came the reply, the ghost of a smirk pulling at the corner of Merlin’s lips.

Midnight found them lounging at their respective ends of Harry’s long leather sofa, the TV blinking merrily in the background as Merlin abandoned channel hopping in favour of scrolling past texts, assuring Harry that he was finding the ‘surprise.’

Harry accepted the phone and was, naturally, unimpressed by the plea of Merlin’s producer he found staring back at him.

“They told me to ask you, since you’d never come otherwise.”

“ _Really,_ ” drawled Harry, rolling his tongue around the ‘R’ and drawing out the ending syllable with a wide grin and a pointed look.

When Merlin remained silent – _grinning at him from across the rug like a feral cat stalking an alley rat_ – Harry placed his glass on the table and leant forwards to brace both elbows atop his knees. “Look,” he began, “I love you, I really do, but I’ll never wrap my head around the fact you made a career out of televising paranormal fallacy.”

“So did you,” the other man pointed out with an accusatory finger.

Harry scoffed, shaking his head and brushing back the curls that fell from that morning’s rigid hold onto his forehead. “ _I_ disprove it, I don’t lock myself in a dark house and pass very shift of wood off as a sign from the deceased.”

Merlin tilted his head to one side, regarding Harry over his own, much emptier wine glass. “Neither do I.”

“No, I’ll admit you’re one of the better ones.”

Merlin accepted the compliment graciously, topping up his glass before flicking his gaze to Harry and settling back into his chair with something wicked in his sharp eyes. He pulled a scrap of dry skin on his lips between his teeth, before taking a long, slow sip of wine and cracking the first two knuckles of his other hand.

“What about the new lad? And don’t pretend you don’t watch it, Harry, because I know you do.”

Harry sniffed, tugging at a loose thread pulled from the hem of his cardigan. “Only for a laugh, James screeching like a child whenever someone taps him on the shoulder never loses its entertainment value. I’d watch an entire hour of that alone,” he grinned.

Merlin’s brow climbed into his wrinkling forehead as he stared, unblinking at harry, awaiting his answer. Sensing that he had already lost the battle long before it began, Harry relented and drained his glass.

“ _Well_ , the new boy’s a lot better than that last one. If I had to listen to the phrase ‘residual astral field’ one more time I was going to order you to fire him myself.”

“He was alright in the beginning,” Merlin conceded, shrugging one shoulder as he stretched out his leg and knocked his heel against the coffee table. He considered his empty glass before continuing, heavily, “But once he knew people were paying attention, he began to lay it on a bit thick for my taste…got us a bit of a reputation, in the end.”

Harry nodded sagely, remembering the fallout from the gruesome contract disputes Merlin’s last psychic had with the show. His friend’s good name had all but been dragged through the mud, and Merlin hadn’t missed a beat before forbidding Harry to defend him against the accusations of faking evidence, so protective was the man of Harry’s reputation within the paranormal community.

Harry was pulled from his own thoughts by the audible leer in merlin’s voice.

“ _So_ ,” the bald man purred, “Eggsy?”

“Ridiculous name,” Harry deadpanned, considering whether or not he was feeling up to playing along with Merlin’s games. He grinned into the flat of the palm that cupped his face as the other man waggled his brows twice into his non-existent hair line.

“He’s a sweet lad, really livens up the place.”

Unbidden, the image of a wide, bright smile – the earnest kind that dimpled freckled cheeks and reflected in hazel eyes - came to the forefront of Harry’s mind. The young man seemed laugh, uninhibited, for most of the time he spent on camera, and – although Harry would deny it with everything he had – the older man often wondered if the blonde was the reason he’d started recording Merlin’s show.

He told himself he was reviewing evidence, scrutinising a new kind of psychic, but that thought didn’t sit too well with the queer feeling in his gut that seemed to prickle every time he heard the blonde laugh.

Which was complete nonsense, of course. The man – _boy –_ was far too young for Harry’s taste, and all that rough bluster that underlay every move he made and every word he said that screamed ‘tenement upbringing’ in bright, neon letters was terribly off-putting. It wasn’t that Harry thought himself a snob, but the idea that he could be seen as anything else compared to this ‘Eggsy’ – _or_ _by Eggsy_ – was enough to dismiss any stirring thought of attraction out of hand.

And his diction really was appalling – Harry often found himself having to rewind the show just to figure out what on earth the boy was saying, however charming he found the butchered syllables and street-honed accent.

_So why did it feel as though he were trying too hard to justify his staring at the young man?_

“Harry?”

_Shit._

Before Harry could say anything in his defence Merlin snorted and shifted in his chair, drawing his feet underneath himself and rocking forward. He was all but quivering with devilment as he spoke.

“Lost you for a bit there, I think.”

“Shut up.”

Merlin left shortly after one, waving off the offer of a taxi and turning his collar against the chill that had settled in the darkness while they had been wrapped up indoors. He pulled Harry in for a quick hug, bumping his cheek against the other man’s and making him promise to at least think about what he’d said.

“If anything, Harry,” he called, as he reached the end of the cul-de-sac and pivoted to raise his arm in another wave, “free holiday!”

Harry did think about it. He thought about it that night while he cleared up the leftover cartons of cold rice and beef. He thought about it while he swept the carpet clean of stray grains and shaves of onion. He thought about it as he considered his reflection in the mirror, razor in hand and wondering if he could get up early enough to leave shaving until the morning. He thought about it most carefully as he turned onto his preferred side and buried his face in his favourite pillow, making sure his phone was on the opposite nightstand so he’d be forced to roll over in the morning to save it from crashing to the floor.

In fact, he was still mulling it over four days later when he sat – suit neatly pressed and Oxfords freshly polished – in front of four cameras and a team full of curious onlookers, smiling pleasantly at Charlie Styat while he introduced him to Britain’s early risers.

He was still preoccupied by Merlin’s offer as Styat asked him if he was planning on doing anything new, and for the life of him, Harry couldn’t explain why he hadn’t hesitated as he said -

“Yes, actually – I’ll be travelling to Florida at the end of next week to investigate a very special case. A friend of mine has his own investigation team, and they were asked for by name by the clients.”

Which is why, he supposed, he now found himself staring down into the face of the young man that had been plaguing his thoughts for weeks, as Merlin huffed and shuffled around them trying to sort cameras into bags and tags onto knapsacks while straining to be heard over the customs and immigration P.A announcements.

The young man before him was wearing the most hostile expression Harry’d ever seen in his life, barely flinching as the only camera operator Harry recognised – a dedicated young woman he was introduced to as Roxy – shouldered past him to hand their declaration forms to a man in a stark blue uniform, while another floated around them, guiding a dog on a leash.

Sharp hazel eyes – illuminated by the glare of the neat, parallel rows of fluorescent lights above them - clenched in anger as the blonde dug his hands deep into the pockets of his garish jacket, and he shrugged off Merlin’s hand on his shoulder when the older man absently implored him to be polite.

Harry - with an uncomfortable feeling settling in his gut that had nothing to do with the stifling heat of the airport and everything to do with how long the younger man had been staring at him - cleared his throat and tried to smile. Judging by the blonde’s narrowing eyes, Harry knew it looked more like a grimace.

“You’re the psychic then?”

“Yeah - name’s Eggsy” huffed the blonde, thrusting out his hand in a manner that told Harry the gesture was one that had simply been drummed into him, rather than one of genuine politeness.

Harry took it all the same, slipping his fingers into the blonde’s tightening grip and reminding himself to keep a civil tongue in his head. He was the intruder here, after all.

“Harry Hart.”

Eggsy refused to release his hand, and if possible, his grip became firmer. “Didn’t see you in Heathrow, when’d you get on the plane?”

Harry, valiantly keeping his smile in place as he subtly tried to disentangle his fingers from the blonde’s almost bruising handshake, jerked his head towards the frazzled investigator trying to account for the twelve heads they’d left with. “I was running late, got there just before the gate closed.”

Satisfied, Eggsy dropped Harry’s hand with a frown, as though he’d only just realised he was still holding it. Harry tracked the clenched muscle in the younger man’s jaw and the aborted fidget in his wrist, and knew the blonde was fighting the urge to wipe his hand on his jeans. Harry silently thanked whichever parent or guardian had painstakingly ensured such politeness in Eggsy.

They stood off to the side as the crew filtered through customs and joined them at the other end of arrival security in complete, uncomfortable silence. Harry was relieved to find he’d be sharing a taxi cab with Roxy and two of the sound engineers.

By the time the equipment and its operators were bundled into five waiting cars, then unbundled and lugged up one flight of stairs and divided between three hotel rooms, Harry had barely managed to catch another glimpse of the aggressive little blonde – only spotting him when he’d come to drop off a bag left in his own room by mistake.

Roxy opened the door with a grin and thanked him for taking the trouble. Harry was beginning to enjoy the sight of her honest smile, and just as he turned to leave he caught a flash of white from the corner of his eye. Eggsy, still in the nauseating gold and black jacket, had found an equally garish cap to match the pair bright, white trainers he now wore on his feet. Harry pointedly refused to think about the wings stitched to the sides.

His disgusted surprise must have shown through his expression before he could catch it. Roxy tried to stifle a tinkling laugh behind her hand, as Eggsy firmly planted both feet in front of the door and crossed his arms over his chest. His jaw, clenched and square and distractingly sharp in Harry’s opinion, set against the tick in his left eye as he silently dared Harry to comment.

The older backed down with his hands raised in surrender, and wasn’t at all surprised when Eggsy’s hands shot out to slam the door shut in Harry’s face.

Harry stood in the hallway, a grin spreading across his face as he realised he was looking forward to that night’s investigation.


	2. The Walkthrough Part One: Time Travel? Don't be Daft.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Merlin turned his attention to their clients as he felt Harry relax beside him. “I’ll recap briefly for the cameras, if that’s alright?” 
> 
> With the agreement of their hosts, their shots set, and a quick thumbs up from Roxy, Merlin began with a comfortable smile. “First we’ll do a baseline sweep, try to eliminate any natural causes for the phenomenon you have been experiencing.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Walkthrough Part One: No trigger warnings are jumping out at me but if you think I've left anything out of the tags then please tell me. Part two will contain mild references to slavery, violence, and horror.

Harry’s second attempt at a civil conversation with Eggsy didn’t start out any smoother than the first one.

They were standing, side by side, against the bonnet of one of the monstrous SUVs Merlin had rented for the team’s investigation. Before them loomed what Harry supposed might have been a grand home at one point, had it not lost its battle with creeping vines and wood-rot. The once whitewashed porch and its balustrade buckled in the centre, just before the door, and Harry – bereft of anything else to do except feel uncomfortable loitering next to the younger man – wandered forwards to peer at the splintering wooden columns, pushing his sunglasses into his hairline.

He swept his critical eye over the entire façade of cracking white wood and splintered slate, accounting for every straining point in the outer walls and roof, satisfied that he’d be able to debunk some of the client’s claims to the natural shift of a decaying house.

Muffled voices drifted from beyond the screen door, as Merlin introduced himself to the Hall family and negotiated interviews. The investigator preferred to speak privately with his clients before subjecting them to the entire team, which left the rest of them pottering around outside.

Sweat beaded James’s brow as he wrestled with an audio crate. Roxy shuffled restlessly, pulling at the neck of her shirt, before huffing and rummaging in her backpack for a bottle of water. The crunch of the plastic bottle carried on the languid summer breeze to Harry’s ear, filtering past him to catch the lopsided porch swing at the far end of the wooden deck, which creaked and groaned in protest. Specks of pollen and weightless seedlings caught in the air, waltzing to and fro as they were pulled together in the wind. Harry’s eyes fluttered shut against the sunshine, spots of light dancing behind the redness against his lids, and as he breathed deeply the scent of freshly mown grass, he turned his head to the sound of an engine rumbling in the field beside the house.

Opening his eyes and raising a hand to shield his face from the high afternoon sun, something caught his attention. Harry’s puzzled gaze drifted to the house, sagging with age, and back to the garden around them.

The garden was in full bloom.

Not a wilted stalk or petal-less head in sight. The air was thick with streams of insects drifting lazily between a bouquet of blue and red and pink, the sunlight catching and reflecting off their tiny, fluttering wings. Tall yellow sunflowers bordered the peeling crosshatch panelling under the porch, and every stone border aligned perfectly, bereft of any hint of weeds or moss breaking through to interrupt the life of the garden.

He couldn’t explain why it bothered him, but somewhere in the very back of his mind, Harry knew there was something unusual about the property.

Turning his head at the sound of gravel crunching underfoot, Harry called over his shoulder to Eggsy as the blonde sauntered towards him. “Strange isn’t it?”

The blonde frowned as he came to a halt beside the older man. “What?”

“Look at the house.”

Eggsy’s furrowed brow pressed against the rims of the hideously cheap aviators he’d insisted on buying at the airport. Turning his head back and forth, he scanned the buckling roof and chipping paint, wondering what on earth Harry had noticed about the property.

_The thought that the sceptic shared Eggsy’s intuition fluttered tantalisingly before him, just out of reach._

“Bit creaky on it.”

Harry nodded patiently. “Merlin told me they were a young couple.” He dipped his head towards the doorway, pausing to listen for the continuing murmur of conversation from within. “They moved here while she was still pregnant - bought the place to be a family home.”

Eggsy waited for the older man to continue, and when he didn’t the blonde huffed, rocking back on his feet as he turned his shoulder to shrug at Harry. “Yeah?”

A conspiring smirk pulled at the corner of Harry’s lips. “Now look at the garden.”

Eggsy did, puzzled, once again toying with the thought that someone else was experiencing the same feeling that had been troubling him from the moment they crossed the property line. “S’wrong with it?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

Harry peered about the garden again with narrowed eyes. “Why on earth would two young people - presumably with the funds to foreplan the purchase and renovation of this house - spend four years investing time and energy into a garden, _of all things_ , when the house looks like that?”

Eggsy fell silent as he followed Harry’s sweeping assessment of the grounds around them.

_Someone was trying to pull his gaze to the right, just over his shoulder, and at the straining creak of a rope breaking the silence, Eggsy shuddered._

Harry, oblivious to the younger man’s discomfort, continued. “Surely making their home safe and habitable should take precedence over a few flowers, especially with such a small child. This-” he gestured to the blooming flower beds, “-makes no sense.”

The younger man, still reeling from the uncomfortable and sudden tightening in his chest – _and pointedly refusing to rise to the bait of looking over his shoulder_ – relaxed as Harry continued musing aloud, his sharp eyes studying the older man as Eggsy considers Harry’s troubled expression.

Suddenly something in Harrys face shifted as he physically shrugged the uneasy feeling free, and in the next breath he turned to face Eggsy with a wry grin.

“So, Eggsy, tell me something about myself - something only I could know.”

Instead of a roving eye subtly straining to pick out any obvious details – _the threads plucking at the collar of Harry’s well-worn, favourite shirt, the absence of a wedding ring, the faint scar of his neck left behind by a long-forgotten childhood accident –_ Eggsy scrunched up his face, and scoffed.

“Are you dead?”

Harry blinked. _That was unexpected._

“What?”

Eggsy rolled his eyes as he pivoted to face Harry properly – _and firmly turn his back on whatever was swaying behind him._ “Dead. Deceased. Expired. Have you shuffled off the mortal coil?”

“No-”

“Then the fuck you askin’ me to tell you something for? It don’t work like that mate,” the blonde explained slowly, with an exasperated, yet patient shake of his head – as if he were tired of having to clarify it.

_Harry considered the blonde’s affronted tone to be a substantial point in his favour._

Taking the bait, the older man nodded. “Well, how does it work then?”

Eggsy plucked his sunglasses from the end of his nose and levelled Harry with a hard stare. “ _You serious_? Or are you just lookin’ to start shit wi’ me? ‘Cause I know who you are, and what you do - you pick people apart cause it makes you feel big.”

Before Harry had a chance to defend himself, a reprimanding cry carried across the drive.

“ _Eggsy_!”

Both men turned to find Roxy propped against the side of one car, sunglasses pushed into her hair – holding back the tide of loose strands threatening to fall into her eyes – with her arms folded across her chest and her eyes fixed on Eggsy.

“What?” came the blonde’s indignant reply, as Eggsy mocked her stance by crossing his own arms and tilting his hip to the side.

He wilted at the pointed look he received in return.

“Yeah whatever!” Eggsy called, turning back to face the house, and scowling at Harry’s stifled grin. As the older man cast a cursive glance at the younger from the corner of his eye, Eggsy twitched, craning his neck to rub the back of his head against his shoulder and staring off to the right again.

The blonde was drawn back to the conversation at the sound of a pacifying, and almost apologetic, question. “Really though - how does it work?”

Eggsy considered the man standing in front of him – the primary cause of his unease about their latest case. Of all the people Merlin could have invited to join their latest investigation, Harry Hart was the one person Eggsy wished his new boss _hadn’t_ picked.

The younger man had followed the brunette’s work closely for years, and while he agreed with Hart’s assessment on some of his cases – _not that he would ever willingly admit it to the man_ – a genuine fear began to manifest at the older man’s ready dismissal of emotional and sensory testimony in favour of visual evidence.

A quiet voice in the back of Eggsy’s mind that the blonde knew to be his own washed a reassuring wave over the bulkhead of his near-immutable anxiety.

_He wouldn’t be asking if he was plannin’ on bollocksin’ you about._

The blonde sighed as he fiddled with the temples of his lenses, pushing the plastic grips further into place before swiping his thumb over the nose pads to dislodge the build-up of moisture. As he considered how to answer Harry’s question, he tilted his head skywards and blinked against a droplet of sweat that trickled onto his eyelid.

“Okay,” he began with a huff. “Ever since I were little I saw things. Things that no one else could see.”

Harry dipped his head towards the sagging veranda steps and took a step forward in invitation, pleasantly surprised to find Eggsy nodding his thanks and making to follow him.

 “At first me mum thought I was making it up, imaginary friends or summit,” the blonde continued as they walked, “but when she started getting worried about me she had me tested for all sorts of stuff.”

As they dropped onto the buckled wood Harry stiffened at the threatening crack, relaxing as Eggsy snorted and elbowed him away from the centre of the step.

“But they all came back clear?” Harry hazarded a guess.

Eggsy nodded slowly, stretching out his legs to scuff the base of his foot across the gravel. “And then the things I was seein’ started talkin’ to me. They told me allsorts about things a child would never know, could never know.”

The blonde squinted against the haze of light reflecting off the cars, returning Roxy’s small wave as she helped James lug another audio crate from the bowels of the boot. He quickly pivoted to face Harry as he continued. “We hadn’t got a computer, wouldn’t be caught dead with a library card neither, and weren’t no internet cafes round our patch. I sat there once and told our local minister every detail, word for word, that got reported in a newspaper fifty years ago about a car crash that happened thirty miles away. An’ I mean, every detail. Names, injuries recorded on the coroner’s report…injuries that weren’t.”

The younger man grew quiet as he mulled over his next words. “Mum realised I weren’t making it up, and there weren’t nothing wrong with me.”

“No,” Harry admitted, eyes flickering over the man in front of him, searching for any telling of mistruth. “No I don’t suppose there was.”

The affronted animation returned to Eggsy’s voice. “So I can’t just tell you stuff about you - _you_ ain’t dead, and you got nobody who is dead comin’ forward…not now anyway.” Before Harry could voice his surprise, Eggsy continued. “’Sides, most of what psychics call _ghosts_ aren’t ghosts.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, they ain’t dead,” he began firmly. “You ever heard someone say somethin’ ignored them - like they saw somebody and they just walked _through_ a wall, or them, or whatever?”

“Yes,” answered Harry, carefully.

“That’s cause they _ain’t_ dead, not where they are.”

Eggsy took a heavy breath, as if steeling himself for the reveal of some _earthshattering_ revelation, his voice low, laden with a sense of severity that softened the angles of his rough accent. “I believe that sometimes what we call _Spirit_ , is really just evidence that in places the gap between this time and everythin’ else that came before is a little… _thinner_ than in others.”

Harry blinked - once, twice, then shook his head. “ _Time travel_?”

Eggsy reeled away from him in bewilderment, before scoffing back a laugh. “ _No_. Not time travel - don’t be daft.”

“But you said-”

“Look,” began the blonde, cutting Harry off with a raised hand that swept out in an arc to encompass the garden, the team, and the world that lay beyond the crippled fence.

“You can stand there and say God and Jesus are real and all that, or you can stand there and say its horseshit, but the only truth in this world is that _no one knows the truth_. Not one single fucking person knows what’s goin’ on. So this is as good an explanation as any really.”

Harry waited with bated breath and one eyebrow cocked for this _explanation_ …and Eggsy grinned, as though somehow aware of Harry’s inward incredulity.

The younger man shuffled back against the railing that was struggling against the pull of the deck behind them, wincing as his movement sent another wave of creaks and shudders groaning through the air around them. “Couple o’ years ago, I worked this case in Bristol - a hotel. Nice place, huge place, - said the whole top floor was haunted. So I started researchin’, cause I ain’t one of them that’s gonna tell you shit you already know, or could find out. I deal in the personal, the _intimate_.”

Harry steadfastly ignored his mind’s desire to linger on the shape of the blonde’s mouth as it curled around the word ‘ _intimate_ ,’ fervently assuring himself that the flushing beneath his collar was simply due to the length of time he’d spent in the sun before they’d both moved to the secluded shade of the veranda steps.

Oblivious to Harry’s dilemma, Eggsy ploughed ahead, pace quickening as he felt himself being swept up by the memory. “So I found out this place used to be a cocktail bar, real nice digs right - bit o’ gambling on the sly.” He punctuated his sentence with a wink, before his face pinched into something more sombre, a wistful, far-away look in his eyes. “But when I walked in I knew they were onto somethin’.”

His attention drifted from the older man on the opposite side of the stairs, and when he spoke, it was only very slowly, deliberately, as if speaking too hurriedly or loudly would chase away the thoughts he strained to catch as they flittered before his unfocused gaze.

“I _felt_ like how a room full of smoke _looks_. Hazy, heavy, _thick_.”

Harry watched the younger man slip into a trance-like state, brow pinching at the centre as he frowned at something beyond Harry’s shoulder. Despite the blistering heat of the afternoon sun above them – generous rays that spilled over the edge of the roof’s shallow shade to warm the tips of Harry’s toes – the older man felt a shiver run through him. The air became colder, thicker, and – although he would later chalk it up to Eggsy being a _very_ good storyteller – Harry could swear in that moment everything even _smelled_ different.

“I saw the mould, the peeling paint, the ceiling half fallen in, and the birds’ nests and carpets all pulled up and rotting…but I swear to God I could see every glass glistening behind the bar. There was a card table pulled three feet out from the far wall, an’ men all sitting round it. One bloke slipped a card from his sleeve, another caught ‘im and smirked, and took a drink of somethin’ dark, dark red. The tiffany lamps on the wall were shinnin’ through it.”

_Eggsy seemed bewildered by the thought, as though he couldn’t quite recall why that was important._

“I felt music _moving_ through me - felt it vibrating in my _skin_. I heard people talking, people laughing, singing, dancing - I _felt_ them move past me…and then I felt a hand on my shoulder, and this blokes voice in my ear, ‘ _scuse me son_.’ And I turned to look, and clear as day there he was.”

Eggsy’s eyes twitched as his gaze sharpened and pulled back into focus. Harry could pinpoint the exact moment Eggsy pulled himself back from whatever memory he’d been shrouded in, and unwittingly shivered again as bright hazel eyes bore into his own deep mahogany. “Not see through. Not cold. A real flesh and blood person. Velvet jacket and little bow tie an’ all, and that weird waxy 1930s slicked back do…and he looked fucking terrified.”

Harry’s own voice seemed very far away all of a sudden. “Like he’d seen a ghost.”

At once the spell was broken.

Eggsy’s eyes pinched as he squinted at the brunette and snorted, voice returning to normal pitch and volume, the dream-like quality of his earlier speech drifting off as lazily on the wind as the specks of pollen circling them. “Like he’d seen a guy wearing a snapback carryin’ a digital camera around his neck and holdin’ up an iPhone in his hand,” deadpanned the blonde. “And he jumped back, real far, and that was that. Like someone had closed a door on my face, and opened a window at my back. I could just hear someone asking him if he was alright, and then silence, and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t chase it.”

The far-away look made a valiant effort to reappear, but Eggsy’s earnest expression won out in the end. “That’s what I mean, Mr. Hart. Not time travel, just, _thinness_. Just like- everything that ever happened is a finger’s length away from me, and if I concentrate, I can feel it all rush past, and sometimes I can grab it. I walk into a place and I see everything that it was before, I hear the people, and they ain’t dead.”

Eggsy’s voice grew stronger, more confident as he asserted what he believed to be honest truth.

_And Harry firmly believed that Eggsy believed it to be true – however true that belief actually was remained to be seen._

“They’re living their lives just the same as you and me, and everything they experience gets recorded or- or something, trapped in time and place, and some of it bleeds through. But it works both ways. I’ll bet there’s some poor bloke in the 1800s havin’ a right fit because he saw a car, or a plane in the sky, or somebody walking about with a mobile phone.”

 _And there it was –_ grinned the older man, privately – _the subtle arrogance Harry had been expecting to shine through, emerging at last. “_ And you think only special people are able to tap into this energy, this… _thinness_ in time?”

“No. I think everyone can. Everybody’s felt something. Maybe out the corner of your eye. Maybe you didn’t look long enough, or hard enough, or maybe it was just be a feeling - but it’s _there_. That thinness _is_ there, and it’s happening to them to. I know it.”

_And apparently the sceptic had misread the ‘subtle arrogance.’_

“Well, that’s nothing I’ve ever heard before actually,” Harry admitted, for once genuinely stumped by the self-professed ‘psychic’ in front of him. The younger man was nothing like the attention seeking charlatans that seemed to descend _en masse_ upon hapless, grieving families like flies on a chunk of blistering meat. “You are full of surprises aren’t you?”

Eggsy’s chin dipped with a startled, pleased huff of laughter. “I do my best bruv.” His eyes were bright as they flickered back to Harry’s face, and the brunette shared his tentative grin.

Heavy boots scuffed along the wood behind them, and both men turned at the sound of the door creaking open to find Merlin peering at them curiously.

“We’re ready for the initial interview.”

Hazel eyes swept a critical gaze over the other men as they perched on the step, side by side, and looking for all the world as if they were being genuinely civil to one another. Knowing Harry’s penchant for being a particular kind of arsehole around those who professed to have ESP, Merlin’s gaze settled heavily on his friend, before he abruptly turned – satisfied that he wouldn’t have to break them apart any time soon - and marched back inside the house, barking directions for camera placement at a flustered Gawaine.

The larger man huffed as he heaved two tripods onto one shoulder and set off after Merlin.

“Duty calls,” shrugged Eggsy with an apologetic grin. He carefully lifted himself from the buckling step, brushing the dust and flecks of gravel pitting his palms against his denim jeans, and offered one to Harry.

The older man slipped his hand into the blonde’s proffered grip, and mourned his forgetting the hand sanitiser as he inspected his now grubby left hand.

_The right remained cradled in Eggsy’s left._

The blonde flashed a dimpled grin and jerked his head towards the young brunette languishing in the heat against the car door. “Roxy’s got you covered, mate.” He dropped Harry’s hand with a squeeze and flagged his friend down across the drive, rubbing his palms together and nodding as she pulled a bright green bottle from the pack attached to her waist.

Harry accepted the bottle gratefully, eyes drifting to where Eggsy now stood talking quietly with Merlin, and turned back to face Roxy in time to have to duck away with a nod, shying from her assessing smirk.

As Harry neared the two men, Eggsy broke from their conversation and passed him with a tentative smile. Harry’s head snapped to look over his shoulder as he heard the blonde’s steps falter several feet behind him. He strained to catch the words the younger man began muttering to himself, and over the gentle whisper of breeze carrying distant rumbling of farm machinery Harry just managed to catch a few words.

“ _Yeah…I hear ya…”_

With a puzzled expression tugging at his brow, and as Harry joined Merlin at the front door to line up shots from outside and within, the brunette kept a close eye on the young man wandering haphazardly across the gardens, twisting to and fro as he squinted up at the great willow tree whose limbs strained to shelter the island of cool grass that was encircled by the sea of gravel drive.

The team was ushered through the front door – clogging the space slightly as an errant thread at the hem of Roxy’s t-shirt caught on a loose coil of mesh protruding from the screen door – and into a wide hallway bracketed on one side by a hefty looking staircase, and a tall moulded archway that blended seamlessly into the cornice on the other.

Merlin’s voice echoed around the high ceilings as he introduced his team, and Harry - hanging back as the others shuffled around him, gathering footage of the interior hallway – began his own assessment of the house.

The interior didn’t appear to be suffering as much as the exterior suggested, but the same buckles and bends in the wood appeared wherever he cast his eye, and it was enough for Harry to immediately write off any mysterious ‘bumps in the night’.

As the entire team moved slowly through the archway into a well-lit, cavernous sitting room, Harry noted the distinct lack of modern furniture. A quick glance around the room confirmed that every article could have been plucked straight from the set of a hallmark plantation piece. If it weren’t for the additional modern conveniences – a mounted television that stuck sorely out of place among the porcelain paraphernalia, and brightly coloured toys that littered the heavy woven rugs - Harry would struggle to believe he hadn’t walked into a historical society’s reconstruction.

Movement through the window caught Harry’s eye, and as Merlin ran through his customary pre-investigation pitch, Harry’s attention began to drift absently between the conversation to his left, and the figure of the young man wandering in circles around the willow tree. The blonde would stop, slowly tilt his face upwards, and peer at the bough of an especially gnarled branch.

Harry followed his gaze for a moment, sweeping across the limb before pausing about halfway along the wrinkled wood. He blinked, squinting against the light. A shallow notch had been worn into the wood, and unlike those around it, Harry had the distinct feeling that this particular indent hadn’t been hewn from age, or rain, or wind.

It was this notch that had apparently captivated the blonde.

Distracted, Harry didn’t notice the sudden silence behind him, or that Merlin was approaching him until he felt the other man’s shoulder gently nudge his own.

“Alright there, Harry?”

The brunette hummed low in the back of his throat, and continued to frown at the scene through the window. Merlin angled his head for a better look.

“ _Ah_ ,” he muttered, turning back to those patiently gathered behind him. “Our Eggsy just wanted to get a look around the grounds before he joins us.” The others murmured their agreement, and as they began to settle into chairs and place themselves about the room, hefting cameras and positioning Percival’s monstrous boom mic, Merlin’s palm cupped the point of Harry’s elbow.

“Come on,” he urged softly, tugging at the other man’s arm until he felt the resistance ebb, and Harry followed him to perch of the arm of the only empty chair in the room, content to settle thoughtfully until he was needed.

Merlin turned his attention to their clients as he felt Harry relax beside him. “I’ll recap briefly for the cameras, if that’s alright?”

With the agreement of their hosts, their shots set, and a quick thumbs up from Roxy, Merlin began with a comfortable smile. “First we’ll do a baseline sweep, try to eliminate any natural causes for the phenomenon you have been experiencing.”

The couple seated across from them shared a brief look before the young woman shifted in her seat. Behind their heads, the heavy minute hand of an ancient clock struggled to lift itself higher than the ‘quarter to’ mark within its dusty face, before it shuddered to a halt entirely. “What could cause that?” Mrs Hall ventured hesitantly.

Merlin glanced over his shoulder, relieved to find that Harry’s gaze hadn’t drifted once more to the window and the blonde beyond it. “I’ll let Harry explain that.”

At the sound of his name Harry stretched forwards to clasp hands with the couple, accepting their grateful greetings with an answering smile, and thanking them for their warm welcome.

“Harry’s a sceptic friend of mine who’s kindly agreed to help us out for this investigation.”

Harry readjusted his perch on the arm of the chair, noting the couple’s fidgeting at the word ‘ _sceptic_.’

Pleasantries dispensed with, Harry felt himself shift into what Merlin jokingly referred to as ‘business mode.’ Harry maintained it was simply professionality.

“My job is to eliminate the false perceptions that can lead people to believing they’ve had paranormal experiences, and offer natural explanations for these phenomena. The most common causes are actually things like the earth’s natural magnetism and EMF – electromagnetic fields.”

“How could that do anything?” frowned Mr Hall.

 _Well at least they aren’t dismissing it out of hand in a desperate bid to cling to their supposed haunting,_ Harry acquiesced privately, before his mind detached itself from his mouth and allowed the latter to shift into autopilot as he recited his long familiar answer.

“Humans are naturally susceptible to magnetism.” Harry paused to assess the reception of his opening, and, pleasantly surprised to find the Halls’ curious expressions still in place, continued with renewed enthusiasm.

“Have you ever come across those bracelets that have magnets embedded into them? They’re designed to alleviate nausea, particularly in pregnant woman, and promote better mental health. Many cultures have used magnets as a means of medical treatments for thousands of years. They have a palpable effect on the mind, and so a greater concentration of natural magnetism could explain some of the strange feelings you’ve reported - but that’s more than likely caused by electromagnetic fields, or EMF.”

Harry’s eyes flickered between husband and wife as he spoke, satisfied that they were following without trouble. “EMF is given off by manmade electric objects, like powerlines and transformers, and generating enough of it in a small space, like a house, can actually cause oppressive feelings such as heaviness and unease. Most of the time when people report feeling a thick or heavy atmosphere in a room, it’s caused by EMF.”

He hesitated as a thought struck him. “You mentioned in your letter that a lot of the activity occurs in your kitchen…yes?” he began carefully.

Mrs Hall answered with a nod. “Yes.”

 _A definite answer –_ pondered Harry – _however, truthful or well-rehearsed remains to be seen._

“Well, I’m going out on a limb here, but I’ll bet that the main transformer for this house is in your basement, right under your kitchen.”

Mrs Hall’s eyes widened as she looked to her husband. “The power cables that connect everything are bolted to the kitchen floor.”

Harry nodded. “That might be why you’re feeling so uneasy in your kitchen - the magnetic field generated by the transformer is causing the nausea, and while there is no paranormal explanation for it, it can be alleviated somewhat. I’d recommend getting some natural magnet bracelets or pendants and placing them along the floor. It may help contain and counter the EMF.”

The Halls seemed to deflate with relief, and the thought that perhaps he’d been wrong to doubt the couple’s integrity once again circled Harry’s mind. “That sounds wonderful,” breathed Mr Hall, clasping his wife’s hand.

“That’s not to say any of the other experiences you’ve had are caused by excess magnetism, but we’ll see what else we can debunk on our walkthrough,” piped Merlin from below Harry’s left shoulder.

As the crew reset their shot and Merlin prepared his next set of questions, Harry listened for movement on the drive. Gravel crunched underfoot, the steps groaned under approaching weight, and through the open door Harry could just make out a figure standing on the bottom step, still and silent, and staring straight up at the tree.


	3. The Walkthrough Part Two: An Imaginary friend and an Unwelcome Guest.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eggsy began wandering back across the path, the toes of his trainers catching the gravel and very nearly tripping him, and as Harry stepped back to let him pass he heard something beneath the crunching of his footsteps. There was nothing near the tree that could cause the creaking, and yet there it was, a low, quiet sound, as rhythmic as a clock’s ticking – a sound that reminded Harry of a playpark swing’s ropes groaning under the weight of a teenager they weren’t meant to lift.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am back after a very long hiatus in which I started writing my own novel and struggled writing my undergrad dissertation! But I am back now for this fic and all the others currently in my queue, so hopefully things are about to get spoopy! Brief trigger warnings in this chapter for mentions of slavery, suicide, and period-typical violence.

“Could you both just pick out a few of the more troubling occurrences for us?”

Harry glanced up from his notepad to the clock on the mantle, and sighed as he shifted the weight from his right leg to his left. They’d been running angle checks and filming filler shot for half an hour, and Merlin was only now settling down to begin the primary interview.

Harry, preferring to remain standing against his better judgement, had set up camp in the far corner, giving himself a wide enough view of the room at large, and the space to move out of the way of the cameras weaving between the furniture. He was quietly amazed by Roxy’s ability to operate a camera that seemed to have others discomfited by its weight. Having settled himself by the window, Harry was intermittently distracted by the play of light spots dancing across his paper as they filtered through the mottled glass, and Roxy and Percival bickering silently between themselves as they fought for angle dominance. At Merlin’s question he resumed his careful study of the couple seated across from the lead investigator.

Before answering, the Halls glanced between Merlin, the floor and each other. Harry began taking notes.

Mrs. Hall especially quiet, doesn’t appear keen to reveal anything.

It was Mr. Hall that spoke first. “The porch -”

Only to be interrupted by his wife. “Not the tree -”

A moment passed between them, in that subtle, unspoken manner intimately familiar to those of us who have perfected the art of marital, non-verbal communication. Once again, Mr. Hall was first to break the silence.

“Our daughter.”

“Yes, Abbie.”

Harry watched Mrs. Hall fidget.

_Uncomfortable. Occurrences centre predominantly around child. Genuine worry._

“She was very quiet as a child-”

_Imaginary friend? Child is most likely lonely and has invented a playmate. Big house, child’s voice echoes - mistaken for children’s spirits?_

“-never really played well with the other children-”

_Imaginary friend._

“-but when she came home she seemed to open up entirely. She’s been as happy as I ever remember her being in this house, just not outside it. The only problem is…”

Her voice wavered as she trailed into silence and turned to her husband, who finished her sentence with a clenched jaw.

“Chrissie.”

_Imaginary friend’s name? Chrissie. Gender? Most likely female._

With a palpable wave tension rolling from her husband, Mrs Hall was quick to interject. “I thought she’d just made someone up at first, someone to play games with,” she explained in a rush. _“Only…things_ started happening.”

Harry felt himself slip into a state of abject boredom at the prospective repetition of _‘phenomena’_ he’d heard encircling children on a hundred cases before this one.

“She can’t braid her hair - she doesn’t know how - but I’ll start getting her ready in the morning, and I’ll have to leave her room to get something, and when I come back in, it’s done, perfectly, little bows and everything, and her shoes too. I know she can’t tie those.”

_Easily dismissed. The child has learnt how to manage it herself without telling her parents._

“Her clothes have been ironed, pressed and ready to go.”

_Easily explained. A frazzled mother forgetting things under the weight of so many new household chores and an imagined haunting._

“And then the voices.”

_Voices?_

Merlin’s surprise was an exact parrot of Harry’s inner notation.  “Voices?”

“She started having conversations with it. At night, when I come to tuck her in…I hear someone in the room with her. It…scared me to death the first time.”

Merlin blinked. “What kind of voice?”

“A man’s voice,” Mr Hall injected, clearly troubled by the prospect.

Mrs Hall continued, twisting the rings that encased her fingers until Harry could see thin red lines blooming across the skin. “She said it was Chrissie. I panicked. I started shouting at nothing, and then things died down for a little bit, but it’s started again, and now it’s like its _hiding_ from me - like it knows when I’m coming home and it knows when I’m coming up the stairs. She’ll just…stop talking as soon as I’m in the room and she won’t tell me who she was talking to-”

The sound of the door startled them all. Harry was surprised to find he’d needed to catch himself from falling forward, having leaned much closer to the conversation as Mrs. Hall spoke. He looked to the front door, and found Eggsy’s sheepish grin rounding the doorframe. Merlin beckoned him closer, and no one seemed to comment as the young man bizarrely held the door open far longer than it took for him to enter. It swung closed on its hinges with an innocent squeak as Eggsy was ushered to the sofa beside Merlin.

The investigator cut the preliminary interview as his team reset their shots and prepared another section of tape. Across the room, Roxy had lifted a voice recorder, informing it that Eggsy had just arrived, and that the second interview was about to begin. She placed the device closer to the centre of the room, and after nodding to Merlin, took up residence behind the Halls.

Before Merlin could speak, Eggsy raised a hand, his eyes fixed on the couple in front of him. Harry tilted his head further right, and saw that the blonde was staring intently at Mrs. Hall, specifically.

“Wait. There’s something I need to tell you.” He turned to Merlin, silently asking for permission to continue. “No cameras. You can record it and use the audio later, but no cameras.” Bewildered, it was all Merlin could do to nod and let the boy get on with it. He shared a look with Harry, having noticed the other man drifting closer to them.

Eggsy’s tongue darted out over chapped lips as he cleared his throat, and after a breath of hesitation, reached out to take Mrs. Hall’s hand.

He spoke quickly, his speech muddled, as though he were trying to pen thoughts that just wouldn’t stick to the paper.

“Thank you, for inviting us here, I – I really hope we can help. Um, I was in your garden, which is lovely by the way, and I just wanted to walk a bit, get a feel for the energy of the place and I...no matter where I went, I kept getting drawn back to that huge tree opposite the door, in that little patch of green in the middle of the drive-”

Harry tore is eyes from the blonde’s face and turned to find the window much further away than it had been before, and he was forced to lean back to catch sight of the tree in question.

When had he moved so close to the sofa?

“-only, I didn’t want to look at it - nothing felt right, the position was wrong - so I went to the porch-“

There was someone in the garden.

Harry stiffened, subtly tilting his face to assess the how far the smudges on the window could be blamed for the shock of blonde hair he was sure he could see, but no matter what angle the light bled through the grime, whatever he was seeing stayed right where it was.

There was _someone_ in the garden.

His eyes drifted lower, and for a moment Harry’s heart clenched.

_There was someone in the garden, and that someone had no legs._

“Harry!”

Fingers gripped his elbow, and Harry startled around to find a frown worrying at her brow as Roxy looked between him and others in the room behind them. No one else had noticed his distraction. Harry’s mouth clicked shut, and he waved off the concerned young woman, smiling wanly as she retreated.

A deep breath, and he summoned the courage to peek back outside.

There was no one in the garden.

Perplexed, Harry began to tune back in to the conversation at large, relieved to find he had only missed Eggsy complimenting the Hall’s garden.

 “-and the sunflowers are my mum’s favourites, and I don’t know why I thought about that, but it was like someone was trying to distract me from the tree – not in a negative way, of course, but…it was like someone didn’t want me to get upset.” He cracked a little smile at the memory. “But now that I’d noticed it again, I stood there and felt this…heaviness wash over me - so much so that I closed my eyes against it, and when I opened them I…wasn’t myself. There was a little girl here, in one of those frilly church dresses, with a basket in her hand - a wicker one. And there was a shadow on the porch, swinging real slow…and when I looked up there was man hanging there from your tree.”

Mr. Hall paled as his wife’s hand shot to her mouth. “ _A lynching_?” she gasped through her fingers.

Eggsy shook his head. “No, no this bloke was white, and he weren’t a servant either. He were employed or something…something to do with horses - but this little girl, her whole world had just come crashing down around her. He weren’t her dad - I didn’t feel that - but he loved her like a daughter.”

In a blur of movement Eggsy felt himself grip Merlin’s hand and pivot on the sofa to face the investigator. From just over his shoulder he felt an apologetic nudge in the back of his mind, as something else began to leech into him, his own words and feelings becoming muddled with experiences that were not his to claim. “There was no regret,” he urged, squeezing Merlin’s hand tightly.

“I could feel him hovering around me, trying to make sense of what I was doing here, but he needed to get out, to get away…he wanted it to stop. He’s sorry he left her, not that he killed himself, and he’s so sorry he couldn’t do more for her.”

Eggsy began to panic as he felt his control slipping, and with a strength not his own, the psychic startled everyone as he lunged for Mrs. Hall’s hand again, physically falling from the sofa to collapse on his knees in front of her. “That’s why he’s attached himself to your daughter, he’s just trying to do for her what he should have done for his little girl, because he left her too early, he could have done more for her.”

The woman was frightened. She was trying to pull her hand away and didn’t understand and _why – why can’t she see I’m not here to hurt._

“He ties her shoes, your daughter’s, and braids her hair and reads her stories and looks out for her because that’s who he is. He’s a paternal energy - there’s no harm there. He’d never hurt your child - he only wants the chance to do more…more than he did for his little girl.”

 _I try to keep away. I don’t want her to be afraid. I make sure she doesn’t see_ \- It wasn’t enough. The damage was already done and Eggsy really, really needed him to take a step back if he wanted this to continue.

_Too close mate._

At once the feeling subsided, and Eggsy could breathe again. Relieved, Eggsy opened his eyes to look into Mrs. Hall’s stricken face, unclenching his grip on her hand as he raised the other to cup hers between his palms.

“You’ve seen him, and he’s sorry for that. Out the corner of your eye one day, in the kitchen, you heard your daughter talking and you looked around and he was there on the stairs, following her up, and you dropped your tea towel and ran after him because you thought someone had gotten in the house…but there was no one there, and he’s so sorry he scared you. That’s why he leaves when you come into the room, he knows it’s your house and he’s trying to give you space.”

Satisfied that the message had been conveyed, Eggsy’s pulse began to ease as his mind cleared and the intruder retreated as they assumed a more solid form – if the reflection in the wooden coffee table was anything to go by. The shadow was tall, and wide, and vaguely human, and as he stared at it, it began to take shape, forming the outline of a pair of broadly set shoulders and a head that turned to look at the stairs. Eggsy followed his gaze.

“The upstairs belongs to him, that’s his area, and he’s nothing to do with what’s happening in the kitchen or the basement.”

Mr. Hall inhaled sharply through his nose, and spoke with all the gravity of a man whose worst fears had just been confirmed. “So there’s more than one?”

Four fingers silhouetted against the coffee table, and Eggsy mirrored the gesture as he answered. “There are four. This bloke’s the good one, and he’s keeping the others at bay - they listen to him sometimes, but it’s getting harder now he’s avoiding you…he can’t always be there to stop them.”

Across the room Harry’s fingers dug into the fabric stretched over his elbows where his arms crossed his chest. He watched Eggsy as he appeared to have an intense, silent conversation with the coffee table. Tilting his chin, Harry was strangely relieved to find that he couldn’t see anything abnormal about it.

“There are two down here – one’s in visitation, she doesn’t stay here, and there’s another woman that won’t leave, or can’t leave maybe…I’m not too sure yet, they’re both very quiet, because there’s another one and…oh…does he not like me.”

Eggsy’s head tilted to and fro as he listened to the conversation beneath the one they were having. The shadow on the table slowly mimicked his movements as it turned towards the hallway.

“He’s a forceful one, does not want me on this property…doesn’t want you here either.” His last words were spoken to the couple after a lingering look in Harry’s direction.

“Where is he?” breathed Mr. Hall.

“The basement,” Eggsy replied, firmly. He continued after a beat, and a motion from the shadow. “And the barn.”

Everyone seemed to startle as Harry piped up from the corner. “Who is he? Slave? Servant? Family?”

The older man’s face fell as the blonde turned to look at him. “This is his house - he’s staying back too,” he murmured, bleakly. Blinking, Eggsy rose from the where he still knelt on the floor.

“This other bloke - your little girl’s bloke, he’s keeping them back, because…your child’s still in the house isn’t she?”

Mrs. Hall seemed to have recovered relatively quickly while her husband still struggled beside her. “Yes?”

“And things are quieter when she’s here…apart from her talking to him?”

“Well, yes, there’s very little negative activity when she’s here.”

Eggsy nodded. “Because he won’t let them near her.” He glanced down at Merlin, offering a hand to pull the man to his feet. Once upright, Eggsy leaned forward to murmur quietly. “I’d like to talk with them alone for a bit if that’s okay.” Merlin pulled back and released the blonde’s hand, raising his voice to address his team. “Yeah that’s fine we’ll go set up the equipment.”

With that, the uncomfortable atmosphere that had entombed the room seemed to break apart, and its occupants began flitting busily about as they gravitated to their leader.

“Right,” breathed Merlin. “Left,” came the snort from Harry, who proudly did not wither under the look Merlin gave him. He allowed himself to drift closer to Roxy as the investigator began barking orders.

“I want four static night-vision cameras on the ground floor - one in the kitchen, one off the kitchen against the basement door, one at the stairs, and one on the porch pointing towards the barn.”

A series of sharp nods confirmed the order as the team began a mental checklist.

“Then I want three REM pods upstairs - one in mum and dad’s bedroom, one in the little girl’s room, and the top landing. I’ll need a thermal and a roving night-vision in the barn itself. James, Roxy, you get the house set up, David and Percival, you take the grounds. I need recorders in every room – Charlie, your job - and if Eggsy’s right about the child’s spirit, I want that teddy bear experiment set up at one point in the daughter’s bedroom – whoever else is free can do that last. Off you trot!”

As the troops dispersed to carry out their orders, Merlin caught Harry before he could nab a camera and follow Roxy, pulling him quietly to the side and folding his arms as he rocked nervously on his ankles.

“Harry, about the EMF - I don’t think it could cause every door in the kitchen opening and emptying its contents onto the floor.” Harry’s eyebrows made a valiant leap for his hairline as he blinked and sputtered. “What? They have proof?” Merlin nodded, eyes darting to where Eggsy had huddled the Halls. “Pictures, yeah, they showed me.”

He turned back to find Harry levelling him with an especially unamused look. Merlin sighed. “Harry.” The sceptic promptly cut off any further protest. “No. Look I’m not calling them liars, but maybe they’re misinterpreting things – it has happened before. An earthquake, a tremor too small to feel? Or even a burglary? A big house like this in the middle of nowhere, how long would it take the police to get here?”

Sensing that his friend was preparing the all-too-familiar ‘Open Mind’ rhetoric, Harry raised both hands and took a step back. “We can’t just jump to the conclusion they’re telling the truth, or are correctly interpreting what they’ve seen.”

Merlin clenched his jaw. “Well I’m not going to jump to the conclusions that they’re liars.”

Narrowly avoided a shoulder to the chest, Harry moved back as the other man stormed off towards the kitchen, and he was once again reminded why he seldom agreed to accompany his friend on one of his team’s cases.

_That man gets far too invested in the clients._

Bereft of anything useful to do, Harry wandered into the garden and towards the nearest SUV, having remembered seeing Roxy hefting cameras from it earlier, and wondered if there was a handheld that could be spared for his own investigation. He had just started rummaging through the smaller camera cases when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He craned his neck to look and found Eggsy grinning pleasantly at him, holding out a handheld in offering. “Wanna try chasing a name out of this bloke?”

“The parents told us what she called it.”

Eggsy frowned at his brisk tone. “Yeah, well they didn’t tell me did they?” He turned on his heel and began walking away from Harry, grumbling under his breath.

_Jus’ tryin’a ease the tension a bit like._

Harry clipped the camera case shut with a sigh and started after him, only to stumble up short as Eggsy stopped dead under the farthest overhanging branches of the tree, and stared back up at the porch. The wind ruffled feathered leaves, and Harry drew back as the very longest tickled the crown of his head.

“There’s somethin’ about the basket though,” mumbled Eggsy. “There’s somethin’ about that little basket and – I was right.” He pointed to the empty porch with a triumphant grin. “It _was_ a church dress.”

Harry peered around Eggsy’s head, looking for something on the decking that would draw Eggsy’s attention. “I’m afraid there’s nothing-”

Eggsy carried on, blithely, as if Harry hadn’t spoken. “The little white one! She was allowed to go if she got dressed for church first, but she had to come back squeaky clean or she wouldn’t be allowed to go next week.”

Utterly baffled by Eggsy’s conversational nonsense, Harry could only tear his eyes from the porch and trot after the younger man as he sped across the garden at very nearly a run. “Go where?” Harry called out, stumbling to a halt again as Eggsy stopped in his tracks and whirled to stare incredulously at Harry, as if the older man hadn’t been listening to a word he’d been saying.

“To the orchard.” The blonde shook his head and took off again, round the bend of the drive and towards another buckled fence on the far side of the garden. His feet struggled to match pace with the excitement in his voice as he cried out to Harry hurrying several paces behind him.

“They go every Sunday, he takes her before church.” He slowed as he reached the fencing, and drank his fill of the wide wood beyond it, cut through the middle with a little narrow path. He heard Harry coming up behind him first, and felt the one bringing up the rear before he heard her footsteps, soft and hesitant.

Harry approached the younger man from the side, craning his neck to catch a clearer glimpse of his face, and he was puzzled by the cheerless dim in Eggsy’s eyes. His mind drifted back to their conversation on the porch as Eggsy’s voice began to take on a dream-like quality, when he had crafted another scene for Harry so beautifully. The younger man’s fingers twitched at his sides, his arms swaying lightly as he wove his spell. He seemed to pluck the words from the air around them as he spoke.

“They go when the sky is bright red, and the air is thick with a misty kind of heat, and all the little specks of pollen and petals are getting blown about and she dances…she dances with the dandelion seeds.”

She’s run off ahead of them, twirling in the long grass, a toothy grin splitting her face as she calls to someone behind them. An echo, and nothing more. She can’t reach him herself.

“And sometimes she kicks them up and he says ‘No. No you can’t do that baby girl –” Harry was startled from the calm that has enveloped him as Eggsy’s voice became deeper and affected a lilting, Southern drawl.

_He’s good at faking accents._

“ – you leave them be, they gotta make their own way in the world just like everybody else.”

Another short breathe of air wafted over them, and for just a moment Harry’s ears pick up a whispered peal of laughter sounding from what he presumes to be the direction of the house.

_The daughter is only child he’s seen so far, after all._

“They pick the fruit in season for Vera – the cook – and then she takes the fruit not fit for the family and makes pies and jams for her own folk.”

“The slaves?”

Harry has the distinct feeling Eggsy isn’t listening to him anymore, but he answers all the same. “Yeah, and a- come on sweetheart gimme your name- a- a- _Alice._ Alice is that your name sweetheart?” The blonde ducked into a crouch, and Harry tentatively followed him down to peer through the rungs of the fence, even if he hasn’t the faintest clue what Eggsy is speaking to. He half expected to see a face peering back from between the blades of grass.

“Yeah, okay, you got the big one didn’t you, you always got the biggest one you could find,” Eggsy laughed. “He held her up near the top of the tree where the fruit got the most sun, and she picked the biggest one she could find and put it right at the top of the basket where she could find it again. And they’d get to Veera and she’d say…she’d say ‘Alright girlie you pick one, only one-”

The voice that came from the young man’s mouth is nothing like Harry had ever heard before. It didn’t carry the same cadence of a man mimicking a female voice, in fact, if Harry hadn’t been staring in disbelief at Eggsy at that exact moment, he would have sworn that he’d just heard a woman speak.

“- and she’d say it just like that, like Alice didn’t do it every week.”

Eggsy rises from the dusty path and looks back at the porch, feeling the rush of energy move past him as she ran towards the house. “That morning she had her little basket ‘cause he was late. She went down the stairs, and she was trying to be real careful, but he hadn’t tied her shoes yet and her hair bows were undone…and there was something on the stairs.”

Eggsy began wandering back across the path, the toes of his trainers catching the gravel and very nearly tripping him, and as Harry stepped back to let him pass he heard something beneath the crunching of his footsteps. There was nothing near the tree that could cause the creaking, and yet there it was, a low, quiet sound, as rhythmic as a clock’s ticking – a sound that reminded Harry of a playpark swing’s ropes groaning under the weight of a teenager they weren’t meant to lift.

“A shadow, swinging real slow, and it weren’t the tree, and there weren’t no one on the porch and she’s frightened because she can’t find him and she doesn’t know who’s outside…but she thinks it might be him so she looks.”

They reach the porch steps as Harry first notes the psychic’s change in tense. “She opens the door and he’s there. Hanging.” Eggsy reaches the third and stops, turning, wide-eyed and pale-faced, to face the tree.

“His neck is black, and she knows what that means - he held her tight when they strung up the Abrey boys in that tree. Her Daddy left them there, and she can’t think ‘cause she doesn’t want him left, and Vera will be up so she gets her.”

Harry began to step cautiously forward, fingers itching to reach out to the young man who stares, unseeing, in front of him.

“People are screaming, and she wants him back, and she is so scared. An’ all Daddy says is…‘ _Could’a had the curtesy to do it out back._ ’”

And there was the voice again, another that doesn’t seem to fit in Eggsy’s mouth. His face twisted into a vicious snarl as he bares his teeth.

“And she hates him, and she’s never hated him more in her life. She stands on her little basket when she runs in the house and…she’s gone-”

Eggsy wilted like a marionette whose strings had been snipped. He stood limply on the third step, not entirely sure how, or when, he got there. “She doesn’t stay here, she isn’t attached. She was just passing through _‘Mister.’”_ He heaves a great rush of air as the lingering presence fades away entirely, and Eggsy is left standing in control once more. He glances down to find Harry blinking wildly up at him.

“I have to get a name.” His voice quivers as though it were the first time such a thought had occurred to him.

Without another word Eggsy abruptly turned and sprinted inside the house, through the crowded hallway and up the stairs, taking the steps two at a time and almost tripping as he reached the top landing. Harry followed him in in a daze. Breezing past the other members of the team, he shrugged at Merlin’s outstretched hands and thundered up the stairs after Eggsy before the investigator could call out to him. He found the blonde frantically scanning a wall of old photographs on the landing.

Eggsy ignores Harry’s stuttered attempts to grab his attention as he darted from one end of the wall to the other, hands flitting across glass panes and splintered wooden frames as he struggled to find the one amongst the hundred that was singing out for him.

Harry watched as the younger man’s hand froze mid-air over one of the pictures. He reached out, impossibly slowly and traced his fingers over the figures in the portrait, lingering on the face of man that stood taller than the rest. Before Harry could get a closer look, Eggsy snagged it from the wall and gripped his arm.

“Is she down there?”

“Who?”

“Abbie!”

“The daughter? Yes she’s- Eggsy! Wait!”

Harry hurried after the blonde once again, bursting into the living room in time to find himself floored that all the nervous energy seemed to drain from Eggsy as he knelt before the child. He offered his hand and held her little fingers as she smiled serenely up at him.

“Hello there, Little Miss. My name is Eggsy, and I’d like to ask you something about your friend.”

The little girl nods quite seriously for a moment, pursing her lips to match the crease on her forehead, before sniffing definitively. “Okay, he says you’re nice.”

Eggsy beamed at her, his cheeks dimpling at the corners. “Well, that’s good of him.” He offers her the picture, releasing it once he’s sure she’d got a firm grip on the frame.

“Is he in this picture?”

Abbie’s eyes barely flitted over the faces behind the glass before she nodded and smiled, pointing a stubby finger to the man in the centre. Eggsy stared long and hard between her, the picture, and something against the far wall. “Christopher,” he decided.

“I call him Chrissie,” Abbie offered, returning the photograph to Eggsy.

“Yeah you do.”

The blonde rose and held the frame out to Harry, already turning to confirm something with the Halls before he’s even sure Harry’s got it. The older man took the picture in his hands and lifted it to the light. There are six men standing in front of a cart, the foreground littered with crates stacked haphazardly atop one another, and a wire cage of what he assumes are dead chickens sitting in place of a driver. The men’s grubby overalls have spotted with age and moisture, and the two sun-bleached faces on the end are almost indistinguishable from the muddy brown spots leeching into the paper. Harry supposed they were squinting against the sunlight, if the way they have raised their hats is any indication. The only man not wearing a hat stands dead centre between the others, at least a head taller than they are. Unlike his companions he was untouched by water damage and bleaching, overalls conspicuously absent as he leaned against the cart in his shirtsleeves and suspenders. As he studied their faded faces, Harry assumed he must have been a foreman of some kind.

He is blonde, an observation that struck a chord with the sceptic. Noting the shape of the hair pulled tightly into a low ponytail, Harry began wondering what such a person might look like from behind. He promptly dismissed the memory of the figure in the garden.

He busies himself scanning for a name, but comes up empty, for if there was ever any identifying information on the front of the photograph it had long been worn away, and all that was left was the date – June, 1845. Harry supposed that Eggsy might have heard them talking earlier, though he couldn’t quite remember if the man’s full name was ever spoken. He certainly couldn’t understand how Eggsy might have gotten the name ‘Christopher.’

Though unsettled, Harry turned to Merlin with a peace offering in mind, placing the photograph face down on the end table behind him. “I’ll go to the basement, get those baseline readings.” He was offered Mrs. Hall as a guide, and obediently followed her down the hallway to a heavy looking door set deep into the wall.

“You have to be careful with the door,” she explained as she fumbled with the key in its lock. “It can stick, and the handles broken on the inside, here you’ll see…” She rested her weight against the door and pushed with her shoulder, grimly thanking Harry as he moved to help. He held the wood back with the flat of his palm, impressed by the weight, as Mrs. Hall stooped to the floor just inside the frame and hefted a crumbling brick against the bottom. There were deep gouges set into the wood where Harry assumed the brick frequently rested.

As she straightens, Harry notices the thinly set shelves to the left of the doorway that strain under the weight of so many boxes. Bulbs, fuses, tools, and wires poke out from the tops of fraying cardboard lids, and Harry turned a questioning brow on Mrs. Hall.

“Everything we need we keep upstairs, these are the bits we don’t want Abbie getting into.”

Harry hummed his understanding and searched for a light switch. “The light-”

Mrs. Hall jabbed her finger into the darkness and shuffled back a step, as if her feet could not touch the shadows for fear of being snatched. “It’s down there.”

Harry slowly turned to stare at her.

“We don’t go down there,” she said, firmly, before taking another step away from the blackness seeping from the doorway.

“Okay,” Harry muttered. He called for a torch and began picking his way down the steps, shining the light directly ahead, and peering through the dusty gloom at the odd shapes and ends of furniture stacked high in scattered heaps. The windows were so dirty it may as well have been the middle of the night for all the daylight they let bleed through.

Harry stopped short of banging into a crooked table, and turned back to the stairs. “Who’s is all this?”

Mrs. Hall was scuffing her feet against the top step, having apparently summoned the courage to come closer. “It came with the house, we haven’t touched…any of it.” She turned to look over her shoulder as a muffled voice came from somewhere above Harry’s head. “Hold on, Mr. Hart, my husband’s calling. Stay were you are!” With that warning the woman disappeared from the doorway. Harry stared at the ceiling, tracking her steps across the floor, and grimaced as the light of his torch caught the downpour of what he hoped was only dust falling onto his head.

As he shone his light along the lengths of pipe and wire he found a thin, unraveling cord dangling from the beam directly above him. Triumph unfurling in his chest, he pulled it.

The face of a man standing about four feet from him was illuminated by the wane light.

Harry leapt back in fear, stomach turning, only to bark a startled laugh as the figure in front of him did exactly the same.  He inched forwards, studying his reflection in the spotted glass. The excessively large mirror was propped against a supporting beam that sprouted from floor to ceiling, and Harry chuckled nervously as he caught sight of himself. At the very top corner of the mirror Harry could see the reflection of the stairs. Illuminated by the light of the hallway behind him and the strained glow of the single bulb swinging from the basement ceiling, Harry saw a pair of legs standing in the basement doorway.

He hadn’t heard Mrs. Hall come back, though he did hope she wasn’t there to witness him scaring the living shit out of himself.

“Mrs hall? Do you know where the transformer box is? I don’t want to rummage through anything unstable down here.”

He directed his question to the legs in the doorway, jumping around in shock and no small measure of alarm as they took a wide step back and the door slammed shut.

Harry tried not to panic as he maneuvered back to the stairs through a maze of long forgotten personal effects. He vehemently denied that the feeling of his jacket catching on bits of furniture conjured images of bony fingers grasping at him from the shadows.

He reached the top of the stairs. The door was jammed shut, and no amount of force could move the handle. Rather than risk falling down the steps, Harry refrained from throwing himself at it.

He listened. Silence. No one was moving above him. The light from his torch pierced the dim, and no dust was disturbed by heavy footfalls. Harry’s hand delved deep into his pocket as he fished for his phone. Figuring he might as well do something useful, Harry texted Merlin – cursing as he realised he had no signal, but sending it anyway in the blind hope it might still go through – and, having resigned himself to the idea of being stuck in the subterranean gloom, began to descend back towards the mirror. He would get his baseline readings and hope someone would notice the door.

With his light bouncing off the mirror and reverberating in the blackness, Harry wandered closer to his reflection again. Just as he was trying to decide how to navigate behind the glass without upsetting the frame, Harry noticed something odd piled in the corner to his left.

Slowly turning, he found a collection of misshapen chairs stacked at bizarre angles. As he moved closer he realised there was no logical reason for the chairs to stay fixed in that position, legs poking out every which way, and the whole thing curving at its tip towards him. Harry gave an experimental hop next to it. He winced. Nothing toppled. He stamped his foot against the concrete floor. He waited. Nothing moved. 

Cautiously Harry approached the monstrous wooden sculpture, arm stretched ahead, then high, then low, shining light through the shape at every angle. Something caught his eye as his arm swept down in a wide arc. It was large, and glinted faintly through the rungs of an old kitchen chair with every sweep of torchlight that hit it.

Inching closer, Harry held the torch to his chin. His eyes flickered to the top of the pile, and he prayed it stay still for just a moment longer. He pressed his nose to the cool wood, and peered through to the other side.

It was the transformer box.

Harry’s eyes fell shut as he heaved a sigh of relief. He shuffled around the tower of furniture and began waving the EMF meter back and forth towards the box. There was nothing out of the ordinary that he could see emanating from the electrics, and as he stretched high to reach the wiring above his head he could find no issue there either.

He turns his skeptical eye back to the mountain of chairs, and felt certain that they were being held in place by something unseen. As he bent to shine his torch through the gaps at the base of the sculpture – for Harry was sure that it was indeed deliberately fashioned so – the light caught something else just on the other side of the furniture.

Harry squinted at the shape in the dark, brow furrowing as he caught sight of a pair of shoes that he was fairly certain had not been there when he stood on that side. He tilted the light slightly ceiling-ward, and flinched as he dropped the torch. It landed in the dirt with a dull thud and began rolling off towards the wall, but the light still caught the pair of legs that sprouted upwards from the shoes.  

Harry lunged for the torch and jumped to his feet. Steeling himself, he shone the light through the chair legs to where he hoped he would not find a pair of eyes peering at him through the dark, but the light traveled, unobstructed, through the chairs and bounced dully off the mortar caking the far wall. Harry bent again to find the legs had also disappeared, but right where he was sure he saw them, he found two faint imprints in the dirt.

He straightened, and took a breath to steady his racing heart, but as Harry ducked back around to the front of the stack of furniture, he heard the quiet movement of another person in the basement. He squinted towards the far side of the room, holding the light aloft and flicking it back and forth from one wall to the other, straining to see anything moving between the piles of old wood and cloth an-

There. In the corner, just beyond the frame of that enormous mirror, Harry catches sight of a head and shoulders very deliberately slipping from view.

A bald head.

Harry bit his lip as he warred with his urges to laugh or throttle the other man, and as he opened his mouth to call out to the shape retreating into the far corner, the door to his left flung open, and the room was flooded with light from the hallway.

Mrs. Hall stood at the top of the stairs, wringing her hands as she called down into the basement. “Oh Mr. Hart! I’m so sorry – someone must have kicked the brick and I – are you alright?”

Harry reached the bottom step and began trudging his way up, pulling himself along the bannister as he turned over his shoulder to grin back down at the figure following him. “Oh I’ just fine, Mrs. Hall,” he began, planting both feet firmly on the top step and pivoting to face the other man who stood just beyond the pool of light that reached the bottom, “Merlin gave me a scare, that’s all.”

“Harry…I’m– I’m right here.”

Merlin was indeed standing just behind Mrs. Hall, and with a cold dread filling his belly, Harry turned back to face the basement stairs. No one was standing at the bottom. He staggered back out into the daylight, and whirled in panic to find the others…grinning at him.

As soon as Harry was able to swallow the lump that had felt like his own heart attempting to leap from his throat, he clenched his fist and thumped his friend hard across the shoulder. “Funny man,” griped Harry through gritted teeth.

“Harry I don’t-”

“The door.”

Merlin’s expression held for a moment longer before cracking as Roxy snorted from the upper landing. “Yeah alright,” he laughed, accepting a second, less forceful whack to the chest. “How’d you know it was me?”

Harry’s heartbeat continued to thud shallowly in his head as he replied. “The mirror.”

“Mirror?”

“Opposite the stairs,” he nodded without venturing another glance into the darkness behind him.

Satisfied with the outcome of their little trick, the wayward team took their excitable chatter with them as they carried on bustling here and there about the house. Only Harry and Merlin remained in the hallway as Mrs. Hall clicked the basement door shut and locked it firmly behind her. Eggsy shifted on his feet as he propped himself against the kitchen doorframe and watched the two men in silence.

Merlin was still chuckling quietly when Harry jabbed him with his pen. “How’d you get down there so quickly?”

“I was on the landing when you went, and when I knew you were at the bottom I kicked the brick away.”

Harry shook his head and took hold of his friends arm. “No not downstairs, I mean- how did you get down to the basement?”

Merlin blinked. “The basement?”

Harry nodded, and turning back to glance at the doorway he tried very hard to ignore the way the blonde was staring at him. “You were in there with me. I saw you on the other side of the chairs, which I want to have a look at again because they must be using glue to-”

“Harry.” Merlin’s fingers closed tightly around the hand the gripped his elbow. “Harry, I closed the door, but I didn’t follow you down to the basement. No one did.”

“Yes you - don’t start-”

“Harry, Merlin was up here the whole time. He was with me on the landing.” Both men turned to see Roxy slowly making her way down the stairs, careful not to tread on the pools of electrical wire Percival was unfurling and taping along the steps.

“Then who-”

Harry voice trailed into nothing as Eggsy extracted himself from the kitchen doorframe and hurried past the basemen’s entrance. The blonde slowed to a halt inches from the older man and stared up into his face, and as he hesitantly slipped his hand into Harry’s, Eggsy’s whispered words weaved an altogether more unpleasant spell between them

“I told you this was his house.”  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So was it spoopy?


	4. The Investigation Part One: Shifting Wood Can't Debunk Everything Harry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two shrill beeps and the crackle of static pierced the silence for a split second before Merlin’s distorted voice came through the walkie. “Go for Merlin.”
> 
> “Where are you?”
> 
> “In the kitchen with Percy. Why?”
> 
> “Did you unlock the front door?”
> 
> She counted her own breaths in the silence that followed, making it to five before Merlin answered.
> 
> “No, we haven’t moved.”

_“I told you this was his house.”_

Trapped in an infinite cycle of play and replay, the words looped through Harry’s mind as he pressed himself into the back of his chair, trying, and failing, to ground himself with the answering resistance of cold wood seeping through his thin shirt. His pen tapped out an absent rhythm against his notepad as his unfocused gaze lingered somewhere in the cracks between the wooden floor boards, cracks through which the darkness below threatened to overspill and seep into the sun-dappled kitchen.

Someone cleared their throat in front of him, and Harry glanced up, blinking to bring his eyes back into focus. Finding Mrs Hall looking concerned, he belatedly realised she had asked him a question. He shook his head, once, twice to clear the fog, and smiled.

“I’m very sorry, madam, it’s nothing - just a headache. You were saying?”

While Mr Hall didn’t look especially convinced, promptly dropping his gaze to frown at floor, Mrs Hall hesitantly returned his smile and took a long sip from the glass of water she clutched in both hands, accepting Harry’s nod of encouragement as her queue to continue.

“Well the lights and things have always done that,” she admitted, gesturing to the oversized filament bulb flickering overhead. Peering at the orange glow blinking in and out of existence as he sat in their pleasant looking kitchen, with the warm summer breeze carrying the scent of freshly mown grass through the open window, Harry wondered how long it would take to remove everything in the cupboards and arrange it just so for a good picture.

In the meantime, Mr Hall had apparently abandoned his study of the floorboards in favour of re-joining the conversation. “But it’s like we said before – it’s mostly just the feelings we get when we’re here, especially if my wife’s by herself.”

At his words, Harry straightened in his seat and inched closer to the table, adjusting the pen in his hand. _Now that is interesting_

“Really? What kinds of feelings, Mrs hall?”

The woman seemed to steel herself with a steady breath, before leaning forward in her chair to nod at something over Harry’s shoulder. “You see the laundry room there?”

Harry turned to follow her eye, and found that the door directly behind him wasn’t a door at all, rather that the actual door had been removed at one point and left the rooms behind it open to view from the kitchen. Through the opening he could see another room that had had both its doors removed, piled high with boxes and oddities, and as he took in the hodge podge collection, Harry realised that what he was looking at were the Halls’ possessions, the ones they couldn’t bring themselves to store in the basement.

His line of sight moved beyond the storeroom, and through the opening on the other side Harry could see the edges of two bright white appliances framing a fourth door, this time intact, with a large brick propped against its base. He turned back to the Halls.

“What’s the brick for? Does the door swing open by itself?”

The answers came simultaneously, a vehement “Yes!” from Mr Hall, and a disconcerted “No” whispered by his wife. Harry was unimpressed.

“Well?”

“There’s a room on the other side - well two, a sort pantry thing and then a small bathroom, but we don’t really use it, we’ve got one off the dining room that’s more convenient.”

“Alright.”

“The electrical wiring in this house is old, sir, very old. They can be…temperamental.” Mrs Hall’s eyes darted down to catch Harry’s pen scratching the words ‘ _electrical fault_ ’ across his notepad, and continued. “Every time I leave the house I do a lap; I make sure everything’s switched off that can be, and then I remove the fuses for the lights, and the, um, the mains sockets-”

“We don’t want to take the risk that something will short out and set the place on fire, you know?” interrupted Mr Hall.

Harry snorted, and suddenly felt sure he would be able to explain away their feelings of unease – _the sudden surge of current through dormant wires would wreak havoc on the house’s EMF –_ but before he had a chance to speak, Mrs Hall shook her head, a wave of curls falling loose from her already frazzled topknot, and reached out for Harry’s hand. Puzzled, he quietly slipped it into hers and was caught by the weight of her eyes on him. As she spoke, her hands trembled, and he felt himself reaching out to envelop them in his own.

“Last week, when I came home, I was putting the groceries away, and Abbie was outside by herself and… _something_ made me look down the hall. I didn’t hear anything, I didn’t see anything, I knew no one else was in the house -” her gaze dropped to their joined hands and she sniffed at Harry’s squeeze of encouragement “- but I knew I _had_ to look down that hall, and the door was open. We’d only just unloaded the car – most of the bags were still in the hallway – and I hadn’t gone anywhere near the fuses yet but…the light in the pantry was _on_.”

“Are you certain you didn’t-”

“I did not go near that fuse box, Mr Hart. I hadn’t touched it. But it was on, and it wasn’t flickering like it normally does.” Her throat swallowed around an aborted sentence, and seemed to abandon another before she huffed and shook her head again.

“I went down to turn it off at the switch, and off it went, and so I closed the door, made sure it clicked, and left. Abbie was outside, near the fence by the orchard boundary, making daisy chains or crowns or something for her dolls,” she finished with a fond smile tugging at the corners of her frown. Through the open window the sound of a child’s laughter danced merrily on the summer breeze.

“I replaced the fuses, called Abbie back inside, and then an hour later I came down with the laundry and…the pantry door is open again.” Mrs Hall gave a teary shrug, and as she blinked away the sheen glistening in her eyes Harry stiffened. Whatever it was she thought she saw, whatever it was she was about to tell him, it wasn’t going to come from a place of untruth. Whatever the mistaken incident was, the feeling it caused was real fear; true, unabridged, unembellished terror. He shuffled a little closer in his chair, the notepad in his lap forgotten as he tried to rationalise the look of acute panic in her eyes.

“The pantry door is open, and the bathroom light is shining through the gap at the bottom of the door. I knew I’d replaced the fuse, and I thought maybe I did it wrong? Maybe it’s just the shoddy electrics? So I load the machine, and go to turn the light off, but now the door’s open, the lights not on, and the pantry light is.”

_A switch in tenses – and she’s seeing something I’m not._

_“_ As soon as I flick that switch again, the bathroom door starts to close, slowly. But not like it’s just doing it by itself it’s like - like there’s someone’s hand on the knob, I can _see_ it turning in the light, and then when the door clicks shut the handle turns again, like someone’s just released the knob.”

“I backed right out of there, took off so fast up the stairs to Abbie and stayed there until I realised I had to back down for the laundry. Both doors were shut, and I know I didn’t shut the pantry when I left earlier, but I figure ‘ _okay - it’s an old door, maybe it swings_.’ But it’s got those furry fringe things on the bottom, so it can’t move unless you push it, and the latch on the inside of the handle is huge, so it takes a full turn of the knob to open the door. I unloaded the laundry and turned back to get the basket and the door…was…wide open - it was actually touching the side of the machine,” she whispered.

“I swear I didn’t see that happening, and so I looked through it and again the bathroom door was open, the light was on, and the cord was _still_ swinging, like someone just pulled it. I felt so uncomfortable, I just pushed the door shut, and then I heard the chain in the bathroom pulling down, and the little click. I put the brick in front of the door and…I left.” She sniffed suddenly, accepting her husbands offered hand with a watery smile.

“Now when I come home and the brick has moved I know the door’s been opened, even if I’m the only one in the house and-”

Her stuttered silence startled Harry’s attention from the page. “Mrs hall-” he began, trailing into a confused hum as he slowly lifted her hand and pointed one shaking finger over his shoulder. A cold prickle inched its way across Harry’s neck as he placed his elbow on the back of his chair and rotated in his seat. Through the doorway behind him, along the uninterrupted flow of rooms shrouded in darkness even at the height of midday, Harry could see that the pantry door was closed.

The pantry door was _closed_ , but the brick had _moved_.

It had been pushed out from the door by about half a foot, as if someone had wedged the door open, not quite wide enough to step through, but enough to peek their head around. As he stared at the brick, now laying flat on its side instead of propped up on one end, Harry couldn’t remember seeing if the brick was tight against the door in the first place, or if it may have tipped to one side by itself.

He rose from his chair, the pen and pad slipping, forgotten, from his lap and landing on the floor. Mr Hall reached down to grab the pad, thumbing through Harry’s notes with a frown, but the pen rolled off to the side, and kept rolling, steadily under a measured force, a quiet scrape of metal on wood, through the open kitchen doorway and after Harry. It came to rest at his feet as he crossed the threshold, and he bent to fetch it, keeping his eyes locked on the door at the end of the hall. He approached it slowly.

His hand hovered above the knob as he heard the Halls come to stand in the kitchen doorway, but when he steeled himself and pulled it open, the pantry was dark, save for a sliver of light spilling from underneath a door on the other side of the room, interrupted by something at the centre. Harry peered at the shadowy obstruction as he crossed the floor, and coming to rest just in front of the door, he pressed his ear to the cold wood and listened.

Silence.

Harry reached for the knob and pushed the door open, slowly at first, until it caught against something. With wide eyes he looked to the floor, and where he half expected to find a foot blocking the way, he saw a towel that had slipped from the handrail near the basin. When he bent to pick it up he frowned at the unexpectedly damp fabric.

_He ignored the twinge of relief he felt._

“This towel is damp!” he called over his shoulder to the Halls, as he straightened and pulled the light chord above his head. “It was probably just one of the crew.” Harry pulled the door shut again, listening for the click, and pressing against it with his fingertips just in case. It didn’t budge. As he left the pantry he tested its door as well, then replaced the brick and made his way back to where the Halls had crowded at kitchen door.

“I’ll tell them not to use that bathroom if we’re treating the brick as a control item.”

While Mr Hall nodded with obvious relief, Mrs Hall didn’t look particularly convinced, and was angling her body so that her nervous peering over Harry’s shoulder wouldn’t be too noticeable. With a pinching pain blooming just behind his eyes, Harry was starting to lose patience with the skittish woman.

He thanked them for their time curtly, and was pinching the bridge of his nose by the time he had collected himself and drained the cool glass of water Mrs Hall had pressed into his hand. He refused the aspirin.

“Headache?”

Harry glanced up to find Eggsy bracing himself against the Kitchen door. He turned and thanked the Halls again for their time, leaving the kitchen with a final glance towards the pantry. The room was still and silent, and the brick just where he left it.

“It’s trying its best to become one,” he admitted, as he passed Eggsy in the hall. With his notepad clutched in hand, he squinted through the open front door to see if Merlin had finished his initial set up, only to stop short as a hand came to rest gently on his shoulder.

“Maybe you should go back to the hotel.”

Harry frowned at Eggsy, as the younger man dipped his head and inclined his gaze towards the basement door.

Unbeknownst to Harry, Eggsy had been struggling to shake the impression of whatever had followed the older man out of the basement. It had crawled into the light not long after Harry had emerged to try a whack at Merlin’s arm, but instead of fixating on the sceptic, as Eggsy had expected it to, it had disappeared into the kitchen before he had the chance to really see what it was. When he’d made to follow it, his feet had become rooted to floor so suddenly he’d almost upended himself, and an apology prodded the back of his mind as he was righted under a strength not his own.

The message had been clearly received, and yet Eggsy worried that they’d released something they shouldn’t have. He was worrying still, as Harry’s sudden headache hinted at a half formed attachment with whatever was lurking just out of his sight, when an especially strong smell began to fill his nose.

He took a deep breath and frowned as a dozen foreign memories drifted out of reach. Wax? _Polish? Boot polish?_

Whatever it was, it was accompanied by a familiar, comforting pull, and Eggsy felt no fear in accepting the invitation. He lifted his eyes to Harry again.

“Wanna head upstairs?”

Harry tried his very best not to smirk as he made to lead the way.

_Mind out of the gutter, Old Boy._

Through the tall windows overlooking the driveway Harry could see the rest of the crew bustling from car to barn and back again, unloading the last of their cumbersome equipment and darting between static cameras. The youngest Hall stood in the thick of it, right below the knotted tree trunk, watching the others avidly as her parents stood restlessly next to Merlin.

His disjointed observation came to a halt as he placed his foot on the third step of the stairway and felt, rather than heard, what he thought was an echo vibrating through the wood above him, were it not for the second heavy step coming to rest on the stairs. Then another.

Harry reeled back in alarm, and his stomach lurched as he fumbled for a tighter grip on the railing when his heel unexpectedly teetered on the edge of a stair. The footsteps continued, unhurried, as if someone were cautiously making their way down to greet an uninvited guest into their home, each step weighted with reluctance and frustration. When the sounds abruptly stopped, Harry could pinpoint the exact stair the unseen weight had halted on, and he was sure he could feel something in front of him, an unexpected warmth radiating from something solid that simply _had_ to be there.

He lifted the hand not clutching the bannister and trailed quaking fingers through the air, and while the marginal warmth surprised him, stronger on his left side than his right, there was nothing tangible that he could feel. A glance to the left and Harry huffed at the culprit. A radiator hissing faintly, its rusted enamel flaking and catching in the faint mist before falling to cling damply to the varnished floor.

_Wood buckling in heat._

Behind him Eggsy sighed and tried not to feel too put out, offering his reassurance to the form struggling to manifest one step above the sceptic. “Give him time,” he whispered, as Harry bent over the railing to peer at the radiator.

_Give him time._

Satisfied that he had found the cause, Harry planted his foot firmly on the next stair and slid his hand up and along the railing. He was about to question Eggsy’s hesitation when he snatched his hand back against his chest. His knuckles itched with the feeling that something had moved across them, a soft caress of warmth that had Harry glancing about for any large insects that had lost their way on the porch and gotten trapped inside the house. As his head swivelled to look towards the kitchen, Harry caught Eggsy staring, and a deep flush crept from underneath his collar as he cleared his throat and berated himself for being so skittish. Hadn’t he just condemned Mrs. Hall for the very same?

Embarrassed, Harry motioned to hurry Eggsy along to the upper landing, and no sooner had he stepped foot on the wooden boards did he believe that he’d debunked yet another aspect of their case. The wood near the heavier articles of furniture was bowed and bent and creaking if he came within a few feet of them, and given the frequency of the misshaped boards, Harry was sure the footsteps could be chalked up to more shifting wood. At least, that was what he began writing in his notebook.

It didn’t explain the footsteps on the staircase, nor did the radiator, not really, and shifting wood would only go so far as to explain away so many things, and as he moved from doorway to doorway, peering into rooms haphazardly furnished, Harry was finding it very hard to forget the figure in the basement.

_“I told you this was his house.”_

Watching Harry flit from room to room, Eggsy hung back and rested against the bannister, ducking his chin and smiling to himself as he felt the warmth of a hand press against his lower back, encouraging him away from the creaking wood.

“It’s alright,” he whispered to the shadow spilling around his feet, “I won’t fall.”

The hand persisted, firmer now, a tangible impression of long fingers and a wide palm pushing him, and Eggsy raised his eyes to see Harry scribbling in front of Abbie’s doorway. He pushed himself off the bannister with a huff, and when he turned to look to the stairs he found nothing out of the ordinary interrupting the shaft of light straining through a shuttered window, save for the dust motes shifting in the air as something unseen disturbing them and followed him across the threadbare landing rug.

Harry looked up from his notebook at the floorboards shifting under Eggsy’s weight, his eyes following the younger man across the room as he began setting up the REM pod they’d been given on the bed. He still wasn’t quite sure what to make of the self-proclaimed psychic, having agreed Merlin’s little experiment on the assumption that he would get the chance to prove the boy a fraud once and for all, but when he cast his thoughts back to their conversation on the porch that morning, Harry couldn’t shake the discomfiting feeling that Eggsy conjured in him, the scent of tobacco smoke clouds and alcohol leeching into plush carpets permeating the air despite the cool summer breeze. Harry’s nose prickled with the memory, and he shook himself free of the fog with a shudder that started low in his spine as another feeling seemed to overtake him entirely, like he’d been sat in one place for far too long and someone had started slowly raking their nails along his legs from thigh to knee, an anxious crawling sensation just below the surface of his skin.

Across the room Eggsy smiled at the curious presence hovering over his shoulder, watching him toy with the REM pod. The familiar prickle of pins and needles spreading through his arms accompanied the presence’s attempts to reach out and touch something solid, but the pins and needles stopped short at the jolt of static Eggsy felt pricking his neck. At the prod, Eggsy obligingly retreated from the REM pod and suddenly became aware that Harry was staring at his own feet with no small measure of concern.   

“You feel it too?”

Harry raised his head and opened his mouth to answer, but flinched as the box on the bed began to screech and flash. As quickly as it started, the noise cut short, and Harry chanced an experimental kick at the bedframe. The box shifted slightly on the covers, but remained still and silent. He frowned.

_Not a mechanical fault then._

Eggsy cleared his throat and kept his attention focused on the window slightly left of Harry, where the glare of the sun was tempered by a layer of dust and grime, creating an ideal canvas for the reflection that was just starting to take shape. “Can you move towards it again?”

Harry flinched again as the wail pierced the silence, this time on command, and the sceptic was forced to admit that he was having a difficult time debunking it as intentional, as Eggsy was crouched by the foot of the bed and not close enough to it to disturb anything.

Eggsy felt the floorboards shift behind him, and his fingertips itched to reach around and reassure himself that the warmth pressing against his back was a solid presence.

“Can you do that again for us, mate? One more time?”

The obliging wail brought a grin to Eggsy’s face that quickly fell into a frown at Harry’s grunt form the corner. “It could be disturbance from outside; they’ve been moving a lot of equipment around the house all morning.”

“On command?” scoffed Eggsy.

Harry’s eyebrow twitched above the tortoiseshell rims of his glasses, a flash of disbelief to match the squint in his eye. His eyes narrowed further as Eggsy huffed and kicked the bed in frustration. The dull thud of impact clearly shook the heavy bedframe, and yet the REM stayed silent.

“Fine” shrugged the blonde, peeling the dark fabric of his shirt away from his sweat-soaked back and plucking it back and forth, the rush of cool air a welcome relief against his skin. Suddenly the temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees as another apology whispered through Eggsy’s mind. He glanced at his forearms, where the skin was starting to pebble in the chill as the fine, blonde hairs stood on end. The goose bumps crept along his biceps, towards hem of his shirt sleeve, and disappeared underneath. Eggsy’s eyelids fell shut as he pressed his now cold hands to the back of his neck and sighed with relief, inhaling a lungful of fresh, clean air, and feeling like he could breathe again for the first time since he had set foot in the house. He opened his eyes to find that whatever the presence was doing for him, it wasn’t extending the same courtesy to Harry. The older man was mopping his brow with an already damp handkerchief and fanning himself with his notepad as he paced around the bed. He seemed to abruptly give up on whatever he was looking for, and fell onto the window seat with a heavy sigh, his head dropping back against the glass while his notepad lay forgotten in his lap.

Twenty feet below the window and a good sixty across the rough dirt driveway, Roxy and James were inching their way through the maze of tools and farm debris that had been bundled into the barn, and wondering how on earth Merlin expected them to record anything useable when they had barely enough room to set up. They’d already laid claim to the ten extra meters of extension cable in the back of Merlin’s car, and Roxy was eyeing the rest of it in the boxes that had been abandoned by the one she came in.  

 “So...” Roxy began, making the final adjustments to the frame of a free standing static cam. “What do you think of Harry?”

James shrugged as he caught the plug tossed his way. “Decent enough bloke, I guess…not sure if he _really_ wants to be here though.”

Roxy nodded and stepped back to observe her ingenuity, having had to prop the tripod on top of the closest boxes to hand just to get a clear view over the tower of useless farm equipment. “Merlin asked him to come.”

James hummed and moved to lean back against the crates that teetered towards one of the walls. “So he’s just doing him a favour?”

“Mmm, but I don’t think he’s too hard done by.” She sidestepped and pulled him forward by the neck of his t shirt, away from certain death – or at the very least, mild injury and great inconvenience – under the crushing weight of two dozen oversized orange crates. The boxes shifted slightly, but stilled and seemed safe enough for the meantime. She shooed James in front of her and towards the barn door, tapping his hip to direct him from collisions with sharp odds and solid ends while he fiddled with the app that remotely controlled the thermal camera he had insisted on scaling an ancient ladder to install in the barn rafters.

“You’ve seen him looking at Eggsy then?” he called over his shoulder.

Her laugh was cut snort at the sudden crash that thundered through the barn. They both leapt back against the far wall as a torrent of boxes and debris came hurtling towards them and crashed to the dirt floor right where they had just been standing. The orange crates remained untouched.

The silence that followed was broken by James’ sharp inhale and hesitant whisper. “Do you think roving got that?”

“Thermal will have,” coughed Roxy, wafting the cloud of dust from her face with one hand while she chased the sneeze building in her nose with a pinch. She rocked onto her toes and craned her neck to peer through the gloom. Nothing moved, no frantic scuffling of claws against hardwood as some poor creature fled the scene, nor creak nor crack of wood to signal another avalanche.  She frowned into the dim and fell back on her heels, speaking mostly to herself. “Could it be a fox?”

James shook his head regardless, as he pushed himself off the wall, and tried to pinpoint the clearest path through the debris to the barn door. “Is anyone outside?” He heard Roxy shift behind him before he felt her hand finding purchase on his shoulder. She followed him through the worst of the chaos until they both had a clear view of the house.

“Did we leave the door open?”

“What door?”

Sixty feet across the drive and twenty below an especially grubby window, the screen door swung lazily in the light breeze, its creaking hinges carrying it back and forth, each revolution punctuated with a dull thud as the door slapped the wooden cladding and then the doorframe. In the stillness of the front yard – the rest of the team having long been left to their own devices – the seemingly deliberately swaying door was made all the more unusual by the distinct lack of swaying anything else. Every leaf lay flat and quiet, every branch and blade prostate in the heat. Even the motes of pollen and flocks of miniscule insects that had waltzed so cheerfully before now seemed to hang stagnant in the air, waiting with baited breath for the signal to move again. Through the broken window on the other side of the barn they could see the tractor still trundling its way across the fields, only now the rumble of the engine was soundless, and the tractor itself seemed to be hardly moving at all.

In the eerie calm, Roxy turned to where James was pointing and shook her head, slowly, as if to prevent whatever unseen force currently manipulating the door from noticing them. “We closed that when we left, remember? Made a big production out of it for the b-roll,” she murmured, slowly inching her fingers towards her belt to grasp the radio clipped there. She heard James swallow low in his throat beside her.

“Yeah, I remember.”

The crackle of static echoed across the yard, and as Roxy raised the radio to her lips, the door swung violently against the side of the house once more, then ground to a halt mid rotation, then slowly came to rest back in place with a final creak. As soon as it slotted back into the doorframe the garden seemed to burst into life once more, as if someone had opened a window at their backs and unleashed a gale. The trees began to sway, the insects resumed their dancing, and the flecks of pollen were once again waltzed to and fro on the invisible current, and in the distance the low rumble of an engine puttered beneath a symphony of chirping crickets.

A cool breath of air brushed Roxy’s cheek, catching a strand of hair that clung limply to her forehead and lifting it into the air. The sudden surge of noise and movement made them realise how quiet it had been before. Shaking herself free of the disorienting fog, Roxy cleared her throat and raised the radio once more.

“Merlin?”

Two shrill beeps and the crackle of static pierced the silence for a split second before Merlin’s distorted voice came through the walkie. “ _Go for Merlin_.”

“Where are you?”

“ _In the kitchen with Percy. Why_?”

“Did you unlock the front door?”

She counted her own breaths in the silence that followed, making it to five before Merlin answered.

“ _No, we haven’t moved_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So was it spook? Cause this is the tamest spook. The next chapter is all spook.
> 
> Hit me up @kingsmanhartwin.tumblr.com for more hartwin than you can shake a stick at!

**Author's Note:**

> Hit me up at [trashbagauthor](http://trashbagauthor.tumblr.com/) or [kingsmanhartwin](http://kingsmanhartwin.tumblr.com/) if you fancy updates about this fic verse, my other fics, and some original work of my own!


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